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Apigee beefs API service for payment card transactions

PCI for API

Apigee – a Silicon Valley startup offering various tools for managing and using APIs across the interwebs – has announced a new online service for providing financial-transaction APIs that comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

Known as Apigee Enterprise Cloud PCI, the service is operated from within PCI-compliant data centers run by webhost Datapipe, the same outfit that hosts Apigee's new API delivery network.

"This is crucial for retail and financial services companies that are rapidly growing their API volumes and need to turn all their interactions into money," says vice president of strategy Sam Ramji, who once oversaw open source at Microsoft.

Since its launch two years ago, Apigee has offered both an online service and a locally-installed software package for managing their APIs. According to Ramji, Apigee handles 40 billion APIs calls a month on its online service and "many billions more" through software installed inside customers' private data centers.

Previously, the company offered PCI-compliance with private installations, but not on its "cloud" service. PCI covers not only how an application talks to a back-end service, but also how the back-end service its implemented. "It looks at what's happening to the data, how it's following, and if it's at rest, where it's resting. And then it looks at who has access to the data and the machines, Ramji says. "It lets you provably demonstrate that the data hasn't been exposed."

Visa and Mastercard laid down the PCI standard roughly a decade ago, according to Ramji, and it's now widely used across the web. "If you want to transact, you need PCI for your API," Ramji tells The Reg. "It's the transactional equivalent of HIPA [the standard for controlling the use of for health records]." ®